Shock Value

The Destroyer #51

by Richard Sapir & Warren Murphy

Copyright © 1983

by Richard Sapir & Warren Murphy

All rights reserved.

Shock Value

A Peanut Press Book

Published by

peanutpress.com, Inc.

www.peanutpress.com

ISBN: 0-7408-0574-6

First Peanut Press Edition

This edition published by

arrangement with

Boondock Books

www.boondockbooks.com

For Pat Sellus and for the House of Sinanju, P.O. Box 1454, Secaucus, N.J. 07094

?Chapter One

Orville Peabody was watching television. Had his mind been operating correctly, he might have said that he liked television as well as anybody. Back home in the nondescript clapboard ranchstyle house in West Mahomset, Ohio, which he shared with his regulation homemaker wife and their requisite quota of average children, he had watched quite a bit of television. As a child, in another nondescript clapboard ranch-style house in West Mahomset, he had squeezed in regular doses of "Howdy Doody" and "Ted Mack's Amateur Hour" between his activities at Junior Achievers, Four-H, and the Boy Scouts. His taste had improved since then. Sometimes, back in West Mahomset, he even watched "Masterpiece Theatre."

He was not watching "Masterpiece Theatre" now. If Orville Peabody's mind had been operating correctly, he might have questioned what he was watching, which was a daytime soap opera titled "Ways of Our Days," featuring an inane cast of adolescent rock musicians turned actors. He might have questioned the place where he was watching it, which was about as far from West Mahomset as you could get.

He might also have questioned the identities of the two men who flanked him on either side, each gazing intently into his own silent television set, listening through earphones to the greedy squeals of a game show audience and violins in a rerun of an Old Lassie movie.